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The future is coming, the future is coming! Taylor gathers up the troops and stations a team to the portal to watch for the incoming colonists/army from Hope Plaza. The 11th pilgrimage starts to arrive without much excitement, but when Josh's stupid girlfriend comes through, Jim runs over to hug her. Conveniently the guy through is an unwilling suicide bomber and (unlike Brody on Homeland) his trigger mechanism works because it is apparently on a timer.
So the portal blows up, and all hell breaks loose as the army from 2149 is now untethered to a certain spot, and luckily arrive right near Terra Nova. But we get to see none of this battle because the show is too cheap to show us any kind of potentially awesome fight sequence. Instead we jump ahead three days and Jim's got a massive case of tinnitus and starts walking around the occupied camp. Seems that while Josh's dumb girlfriend was killed in the blast, Taylor and his men escaped scot-free and are now holing up in the jungle somewhere. Wash tried to hold off the future army from overtaking Terra Nova, but after too many civilian casualties, she caved and is now drinking her troubles away at the bar.
Malcolm is slowly working on the device that allows the future army dudes to go back to 2149 that some dinosaur (that we also didn't get to see!) took down in the melee. In the meantime, Jim plays deaf and sneaks out of camp to help Taylor (who sent his location secretly via a marked bullet). The two happily stop all of the planned sonic explosions that are going to be used to clear-cut the jungle so the invaders can strip mine the land and take the ore back to 2149 for fun and profit.
There's some terrible acting from Jim and Elizabeth as they ponder their fates while having sex, followed by some remarkably annoying stuff between Skye and Lucas, wherein he decides that they are siblings. This naturally leads to Lucas grossly hitting on his new sister and Josh deciding to get in the middle of it. Josh gets beaten to a pulp for his troubles and Jim steps in, so that they both get tossed in jail.
Lucas reluctantly lets Josh go, but keeps Jim around to torture with a taser... until Elizabeth gets an idea to torture the hypochondriac second in command from the future until he cooperates in getting Jim free. Then the entire Shannon family escapes from Terra Nova, with the help of Wash, who gets herself shot in the head for her troubles. I would have liked to have seen that situation entirely reversed, as Wash is far more interesting of a character than the entire Shannon family, but no one writing this show cares about my feelings. Obviously.
Mira doesn't give a hell about the Shannons escaping, so long as she can still get back to the future to see her daughter when Malcolm finishes his device. And though it seemed that Taylor was successful in stopping the explosions, the army of the future seems to have successfully amassed some substantial amount ore to take back.
After Jim wanders aimlessly for a while and stumbles across Maddie and her boyfriend in a heated make-out session in the woods, he remembers that Wash had a message for Taylor. Once he finally gets around to telling Taylor, it reminds the man of an impossible battle that he and Wash once fought where they cut themselves off from the world by blowing up a bridge so that more enemy troops couldn't come in. So they decide to blow up Hope Plaza, and cut off any connection to the future and additional supplies and colonists, in order to keep the money grubbing enemy at bay.
To do this, they have to sneak Jim and a giant dinosaur onto an ore mining ship and sent him through the portal with the other resources going back to the future. Skye helps, and they replace a large truck that held some mystery item from the Badlands with the truck that has Jim on board.
Jim and the dino succeed in taking down Hope Plaza and effectively cut off their connection the future, but not before Jim (and not the dino) gets back through the portal. While Jim is off in 2149, Taylor is having a heart-to-heart with Lucas about some outstanding mommy issues, and Lucas ends up stabbing Taylor. Even though Skye sees this and shoots Lucas a whole bunch of times, he still manages to escape.
But no time to deal with that lost sheep as Taylor has to take his people back to Terra Nova. Seems the remaining future army men and the Sixers have packed up and moved north to the Badlands (with a pissed off Mira in tow, presumably). Seems that the mystery item (which Taylor has in his possession after the old swaperoo) is the prow of a ship from the 1800s, because this show thinks (incorrectly) that it is Lost. What else may be in the Badlands? The world may never know, because god willing this show won't come back for a Season 2. I'm just going to pretend in my mind that one of the meteors -- from the shower that the Shannon family cloyingly gathered around to watch -- hit Earth and wiped out all human wife.
There is so much more of the Skye/Lucas drama and the Taylor/Lucas drama that I barely even touched on here, but Lucas is such a remarkably hammy actor that it was hard to take him seriously. Bulging your eyes out to express shock is not acting, FYI. It made any tension from this episode even sillier than it should have been, and pair that with remarkably few moments of actual battle (sans the dino attack on Hope Plaza) and these two hours were pretty tedious to watch. -- Angel Cohn
Want more? The full recap starts right below!We swoop in over the dystopian landscape of the present-day Earth. (I mean, the present in this show, so really the future. You know what I mean.) It's all brown and dusty and domed, and Lucas is in one of those domes watching as mining equipment and soldiers get squared away for the eleventh pilgrimage. He chats with some nefarious type who we haven't seen before, and they ask about the jagged scar on his neck. Lucas brushes it off as an encounter with a nykoraptor that almost left his boss a poorer man. The boss is all, "Let's not count our money just yet," and Lucas says they have the best army money can buy. You can't buy character, Lucas.
Transition over to prehistoric Terra Nova, where Taylor and Jim are arranging their soldiers around the portal, since they're not sure what's going to be coming through. Elisabeth's there too, setting up med tents, which will provide CO2 infusers to pilgrims or serve as a mobile trauma unit if they wind up with casualties. Jim has to show his much-more-professional-than-he-is wife who the boss is by telling her to be ready to fall back to the colony if things "go sideways" and I think she's there precisely IN CASE things go sideways.
Dunham sets up some big gun facing the portal, and Taylor reminds him that people can only come through a couple at a time, so they might as well use the choke point to their advantage. Dunham wants to know why they don't just shut the portal down, and fortunately Malcolm's there to explain that the portal only focuses the time fracture -- if they shut it down, it will only open again some random place within about three klicks. Sadly, the fact that they provide this information serves as an alert that one way or another, that's what's going to happen.
Anyway, the pilgrimage is scheduled for tomorrow, so there's plenty of time for everyone to get their affairs in order. Finish watching Friday Night Lights, play a few last rounds of Team Fortress 2, that sort of thing.
Back at the Shannon household that night, Maddy has decided that she's an expert on military strategy, since her stupid boyfriend Mark gave her a book on it, and Zoe's hoping to shoot a sonic cannon if there's a war. Josh wants to come to the portal in case Kara's there, I guess because he's really tired of jacking it, but Jim wants him there to look after his sisters. He promises to take care of Kara if she comes through.
The day, Maddy kisses her stupid boyfriend Mark goodbye, and sighs as he turns to wake away, so he turns back and rams his tongue back down her throat and tells her he loves her and she says it right back to him. Meanwhile, Taylor and Washington are being just as intimate in their own militaristic way, and Jim tells his kids to hide if there are any problems, even though his stupid kids are basically lucky to be alive by this point considering all the stupid things they've done.
So: at the portal. The soldiers encircle it as it crackles to life with a time-travelling radio transmission coming through asking if they're ready to receive the pilgrimage. They are, but they're tense, and then people start zapping through, starting with a family of three. There's about a half-dozen people who seem kind of lucky not to have their heads blown off by some nervous soldier, like in one of those first-person shooter games where you accidentally on-purpose shoot a hostage.
Then Kara comes through. "I got this one," says Jim, who goes and hugs her. But the guy through says, "Help me," and rips open his jacket, revealing a bomb strapped to his torso. "Bomb!" yells Jim, ducking for cover with Kara, but there's no time before the guy explodes, sending a soldier flipping through the air. It seems funny at first, but then we watch dirty Jim, stunned on his back, watching everything in slow motion. There's a crying woman, and a guy on fire, and people are injured, and there's the guy on fire again, and then Jim closes his eyes. Why can't there be a guy on fire every episode?
Anyway, Jim eventually comes to in the infirmary, where he's far from the only patient. He's in pain and he can't seem to hear anything, except for the ringing in his ears. He hobbles after some brunette in scrubs who he thinks is Elisabeth but it turns out to be someone other than the woman he's been married to for several years. Outside the infirmary, it looks like a war zone, and there are a lot of annoying quick cuts as Jim stumbles through the compound, almost getting run over by an armored rover, before staggering up the steps to Taylor's office, only to be greeted by rifle-wielding soldiers who knock him down the stairs and menacingly tell him that he needs to leave. He sees Mira out on the deck with Lucas and the boss from 2149 (not that Jim knows who this guy is).
Anyway, he's only saved from ... getting told again that he has to leave, apparently, by Elisabeth, who shows up all, "He's with me!" and explaining that Jim's disoriented. He seems to be able to hear again now, though.
Back in the infirmary, he says the last thing he remembers is the explosion. She tells him that was three days ago. I guess his ears rang for the entire time and then stopped two minutes after he woke up, which is lucky. She explains that after the explosion, the fracture opened elsewhere, close to the colony. The army stormed the gates. Washington held them off as best she could, but twenty-six people were killed before she surrendered. And no one's seen Taylor since. She tells him to go home and see the kids. OK, so this army storms the colony and takes it over but the colonists are still able to freely move about? Am I missing something?
Anyway, Maddy and Zoe hug their dad when he comes home, while Josh is brooding. Turns out Kara didn't make it. "It's my fault for trying to get her here," says Josh. Then he stands up quick and hugs his dad, fighting back tears. "I'm sorry," says Jim, hugging his son. He could probably tell Josh that it isn't is fault, but I'm not going to tell someone how to parent his kid. And can I just say that it's either really stupid or really ballsy to have Josh's primary driving force be getting his girlfriend to Terra Nova -- and then killing her off ten seconds after she arrives? I haven't decided which one yet.
Nighttime now. The kids are asleep. "Where's my gun?" Jim wants to know, because he's an idiot, and Elisabeth has to point out that an invading army probably isn't going to let the occupied colonists HAVE FIREARMS. There are search lights outside, and there's a curfew starting at 8. "It's like being back at Golad Prison," says Jim, which may be overstating it a LITTLE. He wonders why they didn't just clear the colony out. Elisabeth explains that they're hostages, as the army figured that Taylor won't try to take the colony back if there are still civilians inside. Jim wants to know if anyone's fighting back. "Less and less," says Elisabeth. Yeah, it's been three days already, so it's about time everyone gave up, I suppose. Anyone who fights back is sent to the brig "or worse," she says. So Washington's in the brig, right? Nope, but they're keeping a close eye on her, says Elisabeth, like Washington is a problem student, and not, you know, Taylor's top soldier. Good god, what kind of stupid army took over this pack of idiots? Elisabeth's ridiculous excuse is that the renegades like having her out where people can see her, to remind them who's in charge. Don't the soldiers wandering around with guns do a pretty good job of that? Jim decides he's going to go see her, which is another good reason why occupying forces tend to keep leaders of any potential resistance under lock and key.
Anyway, Washington's feeling sorry for herself by sitting in Boylan's bar with her hair down, while Boylan unsuccessfully attempts to get a table of mercenaries to pay for their drinks. Not even the fact that Jim's awake is enough to get Washington excited (which I guess seems about right) since she's still beating herself up over the innocent people that got killed when the army -- a military-for-hire known as the Phoenix Group -- started shelling the colony. She tells Jim that the army brought back another terminus to replace the one they blew up, one that goes both ways, so they can ship back the unobtanium or whatever. But some dinosaurs tried to eat it so it's broken, and Malcolm is helping them fix it. Anyway, she's got no way to contact Taylor. Jim wants to know what the plan is, and Washington doesn't have one, so his plan is to hurt them and keep hurting them until they're gone. That's fuckin' ingenious, if I understand it correctly. It's a Swiss fuckin' watch, as someone once said.
Meanwhile, Mira goes over to the infirmary with a couple of soldiers and is surprised to find that Jim's not there. It's almost like he wasn't under guard and was able to just leave when he woke up!
Jim's gone over to see Malcolm and demand to know why he's working for them. Malcolm angrily points out the window the soldiers put his assistant's head through when Malcolm refused to help, because it didn't occur to Jim that an army that has already killed 26 people might use force -- and the threat of harm to others -- to coerce their prisoners into working for them. Malcolm says he's working as slowly as he can, because while Lucas is brilliant, he's no engineer, and so he hasn't caught on. Jim tells Malcolm to keep dragging it out, and I'm sure Malcolm appreciates Jim busting in and making accusations and then telling him to do EXACTLY WHAT HE WAS ALREADY DOING.
And then Malcolm hears people outside -- it's Mira, along with the employer guy from 2149, and she's telling him that Jim is smart (ha ha ha!), capable and dangerous, and might know where Taylor is. "By all means, we should talk to him," says Shadowy 2149 Boss, and doesn't mention that it might have been prudent to keep a guard on him.
So they see Shannon, who pretends -- with Malcolm's help -- to be mostly deaf and shell-shocked, and in need of crutches. Lucas tries questioning him anyway, about where Taylor is, and Jim stonewalls him by "pretending" to be dumb. Lucas is completely fooled and Jim can't even wait to make sure that all the bad guys are out of the lab before smirking about what a genius he is, and then he bumps into Mira who looks suspicious, but doesn't do anything.
The day, Lucas is fixing himself a little drink, earning a withering "little early, isn't it?" from Mira that he ignores. Shadowy 2149 boss comes in to say that everything's going smoothly in 2149 where the story in the media is of a "containment breach" at Hope Plaza, and that'll take years to clean up the radiation. Their bosses back in 2149 also want Mira to go to the badlands for some reason that we're not going to get to hear before Skye shows up and Lucas goes out to have a creepy chat with her.
"You betrayed me to my father," he says, and she's all, "Yeah, I kinda did, didn't I." He says that he's decided to forgive her, because he understands that Taylor's like a father to her. She admits that, and then he says that makes them brother and sister, and how could he hurt his sister? He strokes her face a little skeevily like he's contemplating doing something ELSE that brothers and sisters shouldn't do, but he just tells her not to betray him again, because time he won't be so forgiving.
Then we hang out with Jim and Josh in line for what appear to be food rations, and Josh grumbles about not being able to do anything, and Jim says he should go get his job back from Boylan, because a lot of the Phoenix guys hang out there, so you never know what drunken mercenaries might say. Or do, really, but it's awfully nice of Jim to put his son in harm's way. And good job being rather cavalier with your cover as a crippled, addled dimwit, Jim.
Over to the infirmary, where Elisabeth is removing a bullet from a wounded Phoenix soldier's leg. When she looks the shell, she gets all brow-furrowy. Then, later, Jim's there, so she can show him what she spotted: a number hand-etched into a bunch of bullets taken out of soldiers who were involved in a skirmish with Taylor's men. Jim figures it out: map co-ordinates! A rendezvous point! Now all he has to do is figure out a way to get past the Phoenix group, which shouldn't be so hard given that he has the run of the goddamn colony.
And Lucas and Shadowy 2149 Boss are commandeering one of Malcolm's rovers to head out on some sort of expedition that involves a "pyrosonic" and apparently a lot of complaining by Shadowy 2149 Boss about a bite he got from some sort of winged snake-bug that growled at him. But what's-his-name, from the flea market, in the wheelchair -- Durwin! That's it! -- blocks the convoy by getting his wheelchair stuck thanks to a dead motor, which turns out to be an intentional diversion to give Jim a chance to sneak into the back of one of the remarkably incompetently guarded trucks.
And they arrive at a spot that overlooks a valley where a soldier (who greets Lucas and calls the Shadowy 2149 Boss "Mr. Weaver," so maybe I missed the establishment of his name earlier) and tells them of the estimated couple hundred thousand tons of meteoric ore just waiting to be strip-mined, once they get rid of the foliage and wildlife, which they'll do thanks to the detonation of a single pyrosonic. Jim by this point has snuck out of the back of the truck and into some bushes, where he watches as Weaver takes the soldier's rifle and shoots a poor brachiosaurus in the head. Even Lucas is disgusted by that, since brachiosaurs are harmless, but Weaver's too giddy about getting his own dome in 2149 with his share of the profits to care.
Meanwhile, Jim has skedaddled off to the co-ordinates found on the bullets, where he's greeted by Reynolds (Jim is startled, and I like to think it's because he's disappointed to learn Reynolds wasn't killed in the fighting). Mark tells him they've been keeping an eye on the spot for days, hoping someone would get their message. Jim asks for his comms so he can talk to Taylor. "We got a situation," he says.
Taylor rolls up in a rover, and Jim fills him in on the pyrosonic plan, and there's a handy soldier, Riley, who says they can trace the frequency or whatever right to the charge, and then she can defuse it.
The charge is, at that point, being set by Lucas and the Phoenix group, with the Phoenix sergeant or lieutenant or whatever the hell says "I'll let 'er rip once we've cleared the blast radius," and I have to agree that waiting until you're out of the blast radius before setting off the bomb is the right move. I can see why he's the boss of the soldiers here.
Fortunately, Taylor and Jim and the soldiers don't run into the bad guys on their way to the charge. When they get there, Riley pulls up the top part of the pyrosonic and says she's "never seen a decompiler like this before" and says it must be Russo-Chinese. Have you ever watched a bomb-defusing scene in any television show or movie ever where the defuser didn't express some sort of surprise at some component of the bomb that makes it trickier than he or she expected?
Anyway, Weaver back on the ridge spots some infrared movement by the bomb and radios Lucas, who figures it's his dad and urges the commander to drive faster so they can clear the blast zone, and we all sit watching a show that's trying to create tension by pretending there's a chance that the two heroes of the show are going to die with an hour and fifteen minutes left in the season (series?) finale. Riley cuts the last wire a split second before Weaver futilely pushing the detonation button, so nothing happens, and then Lucas grabs some sort of futuristic bazooka that rains down rockets on the valley while Taylor et al. roll out of there in the rover. "Son of a bitch!" screams Lucas, and I have to wonder why they bother with a pyrosonic when they can just let this guy chew the scenery and clear the valley in no time flat.
Taylor and the gang have made it back to their makeshift camp, sharpened spikes surrounding the perimeter to help protect about carnosaurs, who have already killed two of their own here, including Gonzalez, who was supposed to get married. I have to say that sucks for Gonzalez, but I don't recall ever seeing him so let's move it along. Taylor asks after Washington, and Jim says she's been better, and she feels like she let Taylor down, but Taylor feels that she had no choice but to surrender. And it's time for Jim to get back to the camp before he's missed -- again, great job by the Sixers and the Phoenix Group and their prisoner policy here -- and gives him a communicator so he can keep in touch. Taylor's plan? Just keep hittin' him. Again, ingenious in its simplicity. You can see why Jim and Taylor get along so well.
So cut to the colony at night, where Taylor, pretending to be addled and muttering about looking for the train station, is escorted home by soldiers who tell Elisabeth that they caught him wandering around on the wrong side of the perimeter. They also warn her that unless she keeps a better eye on him, time he's coming home in a body bag. Again, Jim doesn't even wait until all the bad guys are out of the room before he breaks character and starts smirking about how he's fooling everybody. "That was too close," he says.
Later, in bed, Elisabeth and Jim cuddle while Elisabeth says that she was the one who found him, after the explosion, and he was lying very still. She says she hadn't been that scared since the day they came to Terra Nova and Jim was pulled aside at Hope Plaza, and then he blathers on about how he makes it his mission in life to always make his way back to her, and then they start making out and doing it.
Then we get the Good Guys Strike Back! montage. Jim hobbles around on crutches, looking around furtively, and sticks a tracking device under a rover. You'd think that they'd use a tracker that doesn't have a BLINKING RED LIGHT on it, but what do I know. Taylor and his band of merry soldiers start intercepting convoys. Lucas angrily knocks shit off tables. Washington cozies up to soldiers in Boylan's bar and sticks tracking devices on their clothes. And more Phoenix soldiers go down to Taylor's crew.
In Taylor's former office, a soldier breaks the news that they've been hit again: three dead, four wounded on the evening patrol, with no casualties on the other side: "They saw us coming," says the soldier. Well, yeah, it was a PATROL, but a ninja stealth mission. Lucas snaps that someone's helping his father. Maybe you want to think about your "Let the leaders of the resistance roam around unguarded" policy? It's very progressive, I admit, but doesn't seem practical for an occupying force.
Over at Boylan's, Josh takes a refill over to a table of one: Lucas, who marvels that Shannons seem to be everywhere, and then mocks Josh, saying he looks sad and wondering if he lost a friend recently. Then he sticks a terra in Josh's pocket and advises him to buy a new friend. Josh stays silent through all this, and then broods in the general direction of the table when Skye comes in, having been asked there by Lucas to talk about Taylor and forgiveness, with Skye admitting that Taylor hasn't said a word to her since he found out she was spying for the sake of her mother, and a drunk Taylor saying that he's been waiting his whole life for his father to forgive him for being born.
He strokes her cheek, she protests, and then he grips her hand and won't let go and he gets a tray in the face from Josh, who then proceeds to whale on the guy, and I have to say that this room full of mercenaries is rather slow to react to one of their bosses being beaten up. Finally Josh is pulled off Lucas and held back so Lucas can start pounding on him, while Skye goes running out of the bar for help.
So all of the resistance is gathered in the lab while Durwin explains that the army has installed a new detection grid around the fence, so they're going to need a Phoenix access card to disable it. Skye comes running in to tell Jim about what's happening with Josh, which is that he's getting beaten like a piñata, while -- and this is almost worse -- being lectured by the half-psycho Lucas about how he's been nothing if not generous in his treatment of them, but now he's going to have to make an example of Josh. That's when Jim storms in in berserker mode and manages to take down about 20 mercenaries before one of these terrible soldiers-for-hire thinks to pull a gun on him. "I have to say, sheriff, the limp, very convincing. My father would have been impressed. Did you have a good laugh about it, the last time you saw him?" Jim says he doesn't know what Lucas is talking about, but Lucas has him searched and finds a transponder. "So that's how my father always knew when and where to find us," he says, asking if Jim's been putting them on their vehicles. Jim volunteers nothing, and doesn't respond when Lucas screams at him, demanding to know where Taylor is. Then Lucas glances at Josh and says, "Maybe I can help you remember." He orders Josh taken to the brig, instead of beaten right there to get the information out of Jim immediately. That would have made more sense. And then Lucas just ships Jim off to the brig too, bringing us to the end of the first hour. Or, if you prefer, to the beginning of the end.
Daniel is a writer with a wife and daughter in Newfoundland. If no one gets eaten by a dinosaur during the season finale, he's going to write a strongly worded letter to FOX. Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel@gmail.com.